Textile and Tea and new thoughts for the next Figure

Textiles and Tea today featured a wonderful mixed media weaving artist, Boisali Biswas, who loves upcycling everything, sari silk, onion netting, wallpaper strips, and painting her warp and weft. 

She's so free and unfettered in her work and life and attitudes, she cheered up what had been a downish day for me, allergy congestion, coughing, poor me.

Here she us surrounded by her work, wearing an outfit she wove and stitched without a pattern(!). The pillows behind her she wove. That fancy looking piece of furniture is a cardboard box covered with her weaving. 

She says she lives her art. Her furniture is garage sale or cardboard, painted and upcycled, covered with woven fabric.  She says that since she grew up in India she always lived in a reusing culture. 

She painted her backyard, too! With help from her daughter, the kind of floor painting done in India (and on local sidewalks where I live) with rice or flour, but in Michigan in acrylic. And the fence, when they moved in, was ugly so rather than replace it, she decided to decorate it. 

She was admitted while still in India to a prestigious university, founded by Rabindranath Tagore, where  all students pursued the arts as well as other subjects and that was where she found a love of textiles as art materials, and an appreciation for art in all the surroundings not just galleries or walls in buildings.

In India there is a huge tradition in textiles but at that time not as an individual art pursuit. It was a commercial world and materials were not available outside the industry at that time, thirty years ago. 

So she was an outlier, building her own frame looms and figuring out how and what to weave, since other looms were unheard of in homes, other than by commercial weavers employed in the industry with a home workshop. She used strips of sari silk and whatever she could figure out and use.

It wasn't till she came to the US that she got access to a floor loom and went mad with joy and learning.

She often makes quite small work, but her installation here keeps growing. 

It will be seen in Grand Rapids next year, and people are invited to walk among the parts and experience them. I love this forest concept. See the shadows working.

She also likes using translucency and shadows and will mount works away from the wall with lighting arranged to cast shadows as part of the work as you see below

She likes to use the tree of life image, and it recurs in her work in various forms.

She uses a cotton warp which she often paints, but her weft fibers can be anything that works! She's a free spirit.

This was such a lift to my spirits, too, that I began to pull out sari pieces and other transparent materials ready to work on my next figure. Ideas teeming around. She really gave me energy, so happy and full of her own ideas, she carries you along. And she has a website with much more work on it.

So here are my next raw materials, some are my paintings printed on silk organza, some Chinese silk, some Indian sari silk.

And these strips of silk pieces are the thing after that..as soon as I know what it is to be.

Art simply never fails. It's not an escape from reality, more of a plunge into it.